The Trend For A More Sustainable Industry
From Baltimore to Portland, cities have begun to mandate that old buildings be taken apart instead of demolished in an effort to keep building materials out of landfills. The thought is that we can reuse parts of old buildings in new construction and recycle the rest. At Marco, we agree (we’ve been putting recycled goods into many of our solutions for years).
The numbers are pretty staggering. Each year, approximately 150 million tons of demolition debris piles up in dumps across the country. And that’s in the U.S. alone. Globally, the act of tearing down old buildings (and construction new ones) consumes roughly a third of all resources extracted from the environment every year and produces just under a third of all the world’s waste. No wonder San Antonio introduced a building deconstruction requirement in January of last year, following cities such as Milwaukee in the Midwest, and Boise, Idaho, and Portland, Oregon, in the west. Similar proposals are being debated in Baltimore and elsewhere.
Experts agree that there are still challenges to overcome. One example: requirements often don’t differentiate between reuse—the ideal form of waste diversion—and recycling. For instance, if lumber isn’t sorted and stored so it can later be picked up and incorporated into a new project, it might instead be sent through a chipper and processed into particleboard.
At Marco, we like the idea of reuse. And we’ve long believed in the benefits of recycling and the good it can do for the environment. That’s why you’ll find recycled materials in many of the products offered in the Marco Weather-Tite™ System, including:
- LP2 Ridge Vent
- FlexPro™ Profile Venting Material
- Flex-O-Vent™ Universal Venting Material
- Python™ Single-Layer Vent
- Python™ Weather-Tite™ Rolled Ridge Vent
- Standard RoofBoot™ Square Flexible Sleeve
- Box Gutter Expansion Joint
- RE2® Polyethylene Foam Spacer System
While there is a long way still to go, we’ve come a long way and done some good in our industry. The deconstruction sector now employs approximately 14,500 people and keeps about 350,000 tons out of landfills annually. Still, that accounts for just 0.2% of total U.S. construction and demolition waste. But with it becoming a profitable venture—revenue from deconstruction and reuse has tripled since 2008, to around $1.4 billion in 2022—deconstruction is sure to become more and more acceptable as a standard practice.
As for recycling, only between 5% to 15% of materials in a typical home cannot be reused or recycled. That’s a lot of opportunity. And at Marco, we’re doing our part with the products listed above—making a better product and a better planet all at once.
To learn more about Marco, visit www.MarcoIndustries.com. To contact Marco directly, you can email or call 1-800-800-8590.